I’m confused by your phrasing “there are selection effects”, because it sounds so trivial to me. Every widespread claim faces some nonzero amount of (non-epistemic) selection bias.
E.g., I’d assume that twelve-syllable sentences get asserted at least slightly less often than eleven-syllable sentences, because they’re a bit more cumbersome. This is a non-epistemic selection effect, but it doesn’t cause me to worry that I’ll be unable to evaluate the truth of eleven- or twelve-syllable sentences for myself.
There are plenty of selection effects in the world, but typically they don’t put us into a state of epistemic helplessness; they just imply that it takes a bit of extra effort to dig up all the relevant arguments (since they’re out there, some just take some more minutes to find on Google).
When the world has already spent decades arguing about a question, and there are plenty of advocates for both sides of the question, selection effects usually mean “it takes you some more minutes to dig up all the key arguments on Google”, not “we must default to uncertainty no matter how strong the arguments look”. AI risk is pretty normal in that respect, on my view.
I’m confused by your phrasing “there are selection effects”, because it sounds so trivial to me. Every widespread claim faces some nonzero amount of (non-epistemic) selection bias.
E.g., I’d assume that twelve-syllable sentences get asserted at least slightly less often than eleven-syllable sentences, because they’re a bit more cumbersome. This is a non-epistemic selection effect, but it doesn’t cause me to worry that I’ll be unable to evaluate the truth of eleven- or twelve-syllable sentences for myself.
There are plenty of selection effects in the world, but typically they don’t put us into a state of epistemic helplessness; they just imply that it takes a bit of extra effort to dig up all the relevant arguments (since they’re out there, some just take some more minutes to find on Google).
When the world has already spent decades arguing about a question, and there are plenty of advocates for both sides of the question, selection effects usually mean “it takes you some more minutes to dig up all the key arguments on Google”, not “we must default to uncertainty no matter how strong the arguments look”. AI risk is pretty normal in that respect, on my view.